My Medium experiment

22 December 2017

Last May I decided to start cross posting to Medium to see what impact that would have on pageviews. My approach was to publish first on this blog and then post the same piece a few days later to Medium to get some additional views. Once concern was that the duplicate content would hurt SEO but luckily Medium allowed me to specify the canonical URL which I pointed back to the original post.

So how did this work? According to the Medium stats, I published 89 stories that drove 650 direct views, 587 “additional” views, and 502 total reads. The majority of these came from two posts - one that had 310 direct views and another that had no direct views but 450 additional views. This blog, on the other hand, had just over 59,000 pageviews over the same time period. It’s a bit unfair to compare them against one another since the blog does have a lot of existing content driving some of the views but the difference is substantial. I’m still going to continue cross posting to Medium since it looks as if there’s no SEO hit, it is driving some additional views, and the additional work is nominal due to a simple script I wrote that generates Medium drafts from my markdown posts. At the same time I am a bit disappointed since I did expect Medium to do more of its magic - although given how popular it is it’s not surprising that my posts are not the ones being surfaced.